Ethiopians Starve As Food Sits Idle In Warehouses

July 28, 1985|By William Shawcross, Rolling Stone

Mothers, grandmothers and a few fathers, all dressed in rags the color of dust, sit beneath a corrugated-iron roof, feeding their children porridge from plastic beakers. They are starving, victims not of famine but of logistics, and they are very lucky -- for the time being, that is.

They are in a feeding program at the Red Cross center in Makale, Ethiopia. But outside the compound, in the daytime dust and the cold nights, are thousands of starving children who need food.

The Red Cross center is one of several in Makale, the capital of Tigre, a northern province that, like Eritrea, is at war with the government of Ethiopia. The center has grown every month since December to meet increasing demand. Today it handles 1,500 children at a time. Children brought to the center today are worse off than those who arrived six months ago. In April a record 109 children died.

Many of the children have had half the hair on their heads shaved. Their mothers have done this as a reminder to God that he already has taken several of their children and so perhaps could spare this one. Others have given their sons girls' names and the girls boys' names, in the hope that God will not notice them as he looks for children to take.

Whatever this says about the nature of God in Ethiopia, the precaution is understandable, but it is scandalous that it is necessary right now. There are masses of food in Ethiopia -- half a million tons. A veritable mountain of grain has been shipped since December, and another is on the way. But it is not in the shelters in Makale. It sits in warehouses, miles away, or has been distributed elsewhere.

One of the reasons for this catastrophic state of affairs is that there are not enough trucks. Some relief officials blame the donor countries for not willing to provide trucks to move the grain they have given. Others blame the Ethiopian government and suggest famine relief has become a low priority for the ruling Marxists. Either way it is a new disaster for Ethiopia and for the international community that has tried to help it.

Ethiopia is a huge country -- about the same size as Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined. It is also a transportation nightmare.

Some villages can be reached by road, but not all, and fewer than half of Ethiopia's roads are paved. Most Ethiopians live more than 10 miles from the nearest road, and a walk of several days for supplies would not be unusual. This explains why trucks to transport food are as essential as the food.

At the end of last year, television suddenly awoke the Western public to the horrifying magnitude of the African famine -- far too late to save many thousands. Under unprecedented public pressure, Western governments agreed to ship vast quantities of food to Ethiopia. The plan from the United Nations was for 1.3 million tons of grain to feed nearly 8 million people in 1985. So far 1 million tons have been pledged and 500,000 tons have actually arrived.

By any standards this is a remarkable achievement. But the problem of moving the food inland remains.

The distribution has been far too slow. By May much more food was arriving in the ports than was leaving. Almost half of what had arrived -- 200,000 tons -- was still in storage while children were starving in Makale. Another 60,000 tons were waiting on ships standing off the ports. Hundreds of thousands more tons were on the high seas. At Assab the crisis was self-evident. Hundreds of sacks of grain were stored in the open, many of them broken open. Rainstorms in May damaged or destroyed at least 7,000 tons.

This was all predicted. The man in charge of the U.N. relief operation is Kurt Jansson, who has worked in Cambodia and is now the U.N. Assistant Secretary General for Emergency Operations in Ethiopia. Last December he recommended that the donors buy 300 long-haul and 400 short-haul trucks and provide spare parts for 400 Ethiopian trucks. It was not done.

By April, according to Jansson's office, the relief effort had less than half the trucks it needed.

Even though it is ridiculous for donors to expect a Third World government suddenly to be able to move huge and unexpected amounts of extra supplies without extra transportation, the poor response to the requests for trucks is not hard to understand. Western governments find it much easier to give large quantities of surplus grain, for which they have no use, than to actually pay hard cash for trucks. But in response to this criticism, diplomats of donor nations and some relief officials complain that there are masses of trucks in Ethiopia and the government just won't release them for famine relief.

There is truth in this too. Many of Ethiopia's trucks are being used in the commercial economy or have been diverted to the government's wars in Tigre and Eritrea. More still have been taken for its controversial program of resettling people from the north to the south.